Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
-
- 3,99 €
-
- 3,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Shortlisted for the 2014 TS Eliot Prize
Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Poetry Book Society Choice
In this remarkable debut poetry collection, National Book Award finalist and Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers creates a startling, affecting portrait of a life shaped by war. LETTER COMPOSED DURING A LULL IN THE FIGHTING captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams. Written with honesty and insight, these poems strive to make sense of war and its echoes through human experience.
Just as THE YELLOW BIRDS was hailed as the 'first literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war,' (Los Angeles Times) this collection will prove to be a powerful, enduring classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
U.S. Army veteran Powers, who won acclaim for his Iraq war novel The Yellow Birds, returns to those scenes and to his rural South, in this clear and at best haunting poetic debut. Powers starts in the desert, "the vast unending waste/ of Texas," but soon enough we are in the Middle East, where "war is just us/ making little pieces of metal/ pass through each other." More than about the experience of war, though, these poems of demotic American free verse describe the experience of coming home after a war, and feeling lost: "I can't remember/ how to be alive," one page admits, and on the next the poet imagines himself deceased: "seeing/ my shadow on the ground/ I tried to outline in/ in chalk." Though no innovator, Powers does just enough to the spoken language. Beginning one poem "We are born to be makers of crude tools," he compares another poem to a tool that kills, the infamous "Improvised Explosive Device": "If this poem had wires coming out of it,/ you would call the words devices,/ if you found them threatening in any way." Powers seems confident in his sounds and able to speak to a literate public that knows he has something to say.
